I can feel the shades of my forebears crowding before me, waving their spectral hands at me and admonishing me to go no further.

The bull swam with her out to sea, some say across the Pillars of Hercules to the shore of Southern Spain, others to Crete, where later she gave birth to Minos and Rhadamanthus, ruler of Elysium where the Shades go after death.

As opera matured over the next 150 years, the dramatic duties that at first had been assigned to mere Shades and Furies were taken over by full-fledged gods and goddesses.

Phrases

a shade ——

The Holland group's taut interlocks and quick, nervous counterpoint become a shade tiresome.

When Mr Blair made his comments back in April I said I thought he was being a shade over-optimistic.

With the game getting a shade tetchy in spots, it was perhaps no great surprise that referee Monaghan decided to impose the ultimate sanction on the unfortunate Ryan with all of 19 minutes left on the clock.

shader

Both cores are essentially the same, featuring four fragment pipelines and two vertex shaders - the only difference between the two different product lines is basically the clock speed they operate at.

In practice, this has meant that games writers have seen pixel shaders as an extra set of features, which don't necessarily get as much time on the schedule as core graphics programming.

That, the company claims, will be far more value to developers than version three shaders, which provide no visual enhancements over version two and so far only promise a performance gain over their predecessors.

Origin

The Old English word shade is related to shadow, both going back to the same Indo-European root. Late 16th-century shady is based on shade; colloquial use meaning ‘questionable, disreputable’ arose in the mid 19th century perhaps from university slang. The origins of shades of—, used to suggest that one thing is reminiscent of another, have nothing to do with colour, but go back to an old use of shade to mean ‘a ghost’. The idea behind the phrase is that the person or event either resembles or calls to mind someone or something from the past. By the late 19th century the meaning ‘ghost’ was more or less restricted to works of literature, so it is odd that it should have been revived in this phrase in the mid 20th century. An example from the American magazine Town & Country reflects its popularity: ‘Shades of Jackie O, the Duke and Duchess, Capote, and an era when classic French cuisine, spacious luxury, and swizzle sticks were de rigueur.’